RECENT VIEWINGS (Bad Movie Thread!)

[Rev. Powell]

DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN (1971)
 
Why watch this movie?
Maybe for the Dracula with a Mike Brady perm and an echo box voice.

Show more respect for the great Zandor Vorkov!

[RCMerchant]

^Hey- that is the first film I ever saw and thought- "This is really BAD!" And I was only 10!
Now it's gotta be one of my favorite 'BAD' movies.

[Dr. Whom]

Bilitis (1977)

This came out when I was at an impressionable age, and I think I can speak for many of my generation when I say that the poster fueled a lot of fantasies. So I had to check it out after all these years.

It is story of a schoolgirl finding love. Ostensibly based on the pseudo ancient Greek poems of Pierre Louys, it has very little to do with the source material. For one thing, it is set in the South of France in a strange period that is halfway the 1930s and the 1970s, which is mainly notable for the near universal absence of bras.

It is hard to comment on the performance of the actors, as the whole thing is so inane, it makes your average Jean Rollin movie look like oscar material. But that is not why one watches it, however, it is because of the pretty pictures of naked girls. In this, it does not disappoint. You are barely five minutes in when an entire class of school girls (in their twenties) go skinny dipping, and the movie keeps up this pace.

Whether that is enough to keep your interest for 95 minutes, I leave up to you.

[RCMerchant]

FACE OF THE SCREAMING WEREWOLF (1959/1964)

A woman is regressed hypnotically to her previous life as an Aztec Princess by some looney doctors. She leads them to an ancient temple that contains the Aztec Mummy and...Lon Chaney Jr. in mummy garb!
The docs take Lon back to their wax museum (?) lab and revive him courtsy of some high voltage ala Frankenstein and he turns into a werewolf! The Aztec Mummy briefly shows up and then promptly disappers again. Lon Grabs a woman, climbs up the side of a building with her like a mini Kong, goes through a window and runs down the stairs to ground level again. After mauling the doctors, he's set on fire and changes back to Lon .
"He was just a regular guy." The End.
This was a mash up of an Aztec Mummy film and a Mexican comedy film with all the (intentional) comedy cut out titled LA CASA DEL TERROR. Enter Jerry Warren who butchered both and threw them together to make this travesty.


Lon as a hefty mummy-






and in his last foray as a Wolf Man-

[zombie no.one]

DISCLOSURE (1994)

Schlock-fest disguised as hard hitting drama... tries too hard to be all sassy and contemporary (for '94) and so therefore looks incredibly dated now. (and not just cause of the heavy reliance on dawn-of-the-internet tech)

There was definitely a particular style of acting / scriptwriting / directing from this early to mid 90s era which tried to come off as vaguely snarky, sarcastic, 'witty'... it's not convincing. Got the same vibe from SWIMMING WITH SHARKS, which I watched fairly recently (also made in 1994).

Michael Douglas is a bit of a fluffball. I think he could've been a great actor in the right circumstances, but seemed to punch below his weight in terms of roles? maybe that's just my perception. Never quite hopped on the Demi Moore bandwagon either... bit too Hollywood(en) for me.

5/10

[M.10rda]

ACT OF VENGEANCE (1973):
This r*pe/revenge flick gets some things very right and tries to get other things right (maybe?) but fails outrageously, which ends up making the entire affair even sleazier than many such films, in spite of it being less graphic than most. An alarming serial maniac in a hockey mask (!7 years before the original F13!) stalks and assaults a series of victims, urging them to fight back then getting rough when they do, before finally demanding that they sing "Jingle Bells" to help him to completion. These scenes are completely horrifying, which is commendable, I guess. There's a little nudity but no onscreen sexual violence - just close-ups of faces as Jason 0.99 slaps and punches the ladies and threatens them w/ worse violence - and that's plenty!

Early on the Final Girl goes to the police for a humiliating interview, medical exam, and some condescension from coffee-swigging background pigs. AOV is co-written by a woman and she (presumably) got this whole sequence totally on-the-nose. But she has a male writing partner and a male director and the film was produced by AIP, so there was no way AOV was ever going to play out like THE ACCUSED. The FG recruits Jason's other victims and they decide to go learn martial arts together, then unwind in a topless sauna and hot tub    which I'm sure is how most victims of assault like to overcome their trauma.      Then, naturally, they decide to form a "r*pe squad", where the FG puts herself repeatedly in more sexual danger      in order for the other ladies to show up and save her.    Yes, ACT OF VENGEANCE takes place 100,000% in Hollywood fantasyland.

On one hand, the first scene where they royally mess up a repeat date r*pist is extremely entertaining and satisfying. On the other hand, the film stalls out when they quickly run out of dangerous targets and begin to pick on pimps and pathetic obscene phone callers. At last we arrive at the final act, where Jason lures them into an elaborate (or ridiculous) trap in a zoo (!), which puts the Squad in danger yet again, which is the opposite of what I was interested in seeing. There are a few absurd twists and the film ends on something of an anti-climax. (Maybe playing "Jingle Bells" on the soundtrack would've helped...?)

2.5/5
Another one of those Almost Good Enough It's A Shame It Wasn't Better/Smarter kinda' sleaze flicks.

[M.10rda]

TINY PLASTIC SHARKS (2023):
I am going to do something I try not to do and relate the entire synopsis of this film (now available on Youtube), as a public service announcement. Two awkward young pseudo-hipsters return to the guy's apartment, make (likely improvised) awkward small talk in long takes of medium wide shots, then eventually end up spending the night together. During this routine evening of romance, the dude reveals to the girl that he has a borderline fanatical fixation on the eponymous colorful inanimate objects. After some reflection, the chick admits that, while she doesn't quite understand this fetish, she's into it. They then drop some TPSs in a couple of mugs of water, pass out on the apartment floor, and, thirty-seven minutes in, the screen goes to black.

And stays there for another 58 minutes. No soundtrack, no closing credits, nothing.

I reflected on TINY PLASTIC SHARKS at some length while working outside this weekend. My initial, glib instinct was to frame the film as an elaborate "Rick Roll", and perhaps it is, though comments on YT and reviews on Letterboxd assert that the writer/director is indeed passionately obsessive about tiny plastic sharks. It also occurred to me that the film's ending was conversant w/ the controversial ending to the series finale of "The Sopranos", though that blackout lasted several seconds, not 58 damn minutes. Circumspect as I've become in my old age, I don't wish to condemn a young filmmaker's deeply personal passion project. So I will just contextualize TPS within the historical discourse of another divisive experimental film artist, Andy Warhol.

Warhol made several long films that many critics claimed were devoid of content or purpose, such as films of tall buildings or of people sleeping. Nonetheless, audiences in the 60s entered rooms and endured these (often hours-long) projects before declaring them preposterous or deplorable. I suspect this was because Warhol had himself spent many additional hours making these puzzling films. If he wished to film someone sleeping, he could only leave a camera running about 20 minutes at most while he f'd off to have a coffee or a smoke, then he'd have to change the mag and hit record anew. Likewise, he couldn't just leave his camera running to film hours of tall buildings in NYC - he had to stand nearby and prevent some creep from scuppering off w/ the camera to the nearest pawnbroker. (Naturally he also had to assemble the celluloid the old fashion way, pay to strike prints, etc....) Thus materially and in relation to labor, Warhol had a lot invested in his apparently pointless experimental films, and viewers knew this and took his work seriously enough to study it before declaring it was a ridiculous waste of time.

TINY PLASTIC SHARKS looks like it was shot on a phone and that each of the half dozen or so shots were captured in a single take. Although it claims to be written, the performances would suggest otherwise. It was probably likewise edited "in camera" or rather on some cellular app that makes assembling footage infinitely quicker and easier than it was in the 60s, or the 90s when I was in film school. Generating [ x ] minutes and seconds of black footage M.O.S. takes seconds in Sony Vegas and may for all I know take less even time in a phone app. Therefore I reflect on the possibility that TINY PLASTIC SHARKS might be the first film I can think of that will take the viewer longer to watch than it took the filmmaker to create. What that may mean to you, I will allow you to determine.

  / 5   
But this ain't exactly a recommendation.

[LilCerberus]

Tonight's Stinker
The Cape Canaveral Monsters (1960)
https://youtu.be/2kfrFShQqbQ?si=r4FJlWnEIxm-M9UJ

Uh, yeah, NO MONSTERS, just a pair of foo-fighters that possess a bickering middle age couple who happen to be wearing jumpsuits.... They get possessed while driving, so they get in a wreck & never bother to clean up....

Meanwhile, scientists at a nearby missile lab are frustrated by constant failures... A young scientist suggests space critters, which earns him the scorn of his elders... The lead scientist is also not fond of this guy dating his niece....
Later that night, the scientists are on a double date, when the protagonist hears static on the radio, which he identifies as an illegal transmitter, and concludes it must be the aliens....

Gets a bit exploitive for an early '60s TV movie, starts to muddle real bad about halfway through, and the low budget really shines through... Still makes for an interesting curio.....